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Comment by ranni_ending | Hacker News Reader

yeah at another point he distanced himself from making racist movies about country he has 0 idea about. then you bring up an example of him trying to hide behind his Jewish identity to be above criticism as a "joke".

it's trivial to punch down and then act like a victim by bringing up your own identity.

People who find it easy to make fun of others while being extremely thin-skinned themselves: https://www.timesofisrael.com/sacha-baron-cohen-tells-tiktok... for a legitimate dissent on his holy cow country. I imagine making fun of Israel in the same vein and making a movie about it in the same style would get anyone blacklisted in Hollywood. There will be 10 OP-EDs about how that's antisemitic and disrespectful. But because it's Kazakhstan nobody gives a shit and we're supposed to suck it up and laugh with others a la Oldboy.

It might be hilarious to you, but for ethnic Kazakhs it isn't (self-respecting ones at least).

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I live in Kazakhstan as expat, and locals are brought up patriotic pretty much like in America -- national anthem at school every day (I shivered when I learned about it, both about KZ and America), told they're the richest post-soviet country. So the movie that plays the anthem and highlights so much that he's from Kazakhstan (although he looks nothing like a Kazakh), looks like a serious insult.

(edit: to be exact, I don't mean he mocks this partiotism, there's nothing to do with it in the movie.)

I've been told that the true meaning was to film Americans with candid camera and laugh at how stupid they are, but to me, Borat is the only thing people utter when I say where I am, so it's pretty annoying.

OTOH, given this popularity, nat. govt could have paid some petro-uranium-dollars to Cohen for some tourism commercials.

Maybe this has changed in recent years, or it's different in the south or the west of the country where more "ultra-patriots" live, but it wasn't my experience at all in the middle of 2000s. We had to listen to the national anthem several times per year on national holidays, and perform other token gestures like that, but nobody took it seriously and these actions were relentlessly ridiculed.

Not because of lack of patriotism, but because of the synthetic and bureaucratic feeling of the whole deal.

So the parody misses the mark.

Borat is really about the US society anyway, they could have picked absolutely anything else and it wouldn't make a difference.

> But Borat is the only thing people utter when I say where I live now

Own it and as soon as people see you don't care, they drop the subject. The joke was old ten years ago.

I didn't mean he parodied the patriotism. I mean to serious patriots, this is a slap in the face, even when in fact it says nothing of Kz at all.

He's not punching down or hiding behind an ethnic identity, he's mocking the idea of someone being upset over a parody/mockery/comedy.

Yeah, but I see his point about getting away with this type of humor only because most viewers hardly know Kazachstan actually exists. I might be upset if I were a Kazakh, or I might not be - but I probably would find I hilarious.

> because most viewers hardly know Kazachstan actually exists

I really don't mean to be insulting to US people here, but I really think this would be a huge difference in the populations between the US and other countries where the film was popular.

He absolutely was punching down. He used his high status to mock a low-status (in the West) ethnicity, and shamelessly used selective editing to make everyone other than himself look like a bigot and an asshole. When rightly criticized for this, he acted like he was the victim.

It was an awful display which has not aged well and will look even worse over time.

I'd say that's a minority opinion, not especially supported by facts.

Regardless, his movies/tv shows always involved massive amounts of editing and manipulation.

Like the time they portrayed some random (Christian) Palestinian as a leader of a Islamist terrorist brigade which supposedly had a huge negative impact on his life.

Just this incident alone shows that Sacha Baron Cohen is a horrible and a despicable person.

Rich dude makes fun of a nation for being poor and when they take issue he plays antisemitism card.

Sure, that's one way you could describe things, although not especially accurately.

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